Squat or Sit?

Squat Toilets and Raised Commodes

This is the biggest toilet question in the minds of most
international travelers.
For some potential travelers, especially Americans,
it may be the biggest question of all
and a large part of what keeps them from traveling
out of their fear of the different and the unfamiliar:
When I visit that country,
what will the toilets be like?
Will they be squat toilets,
pans in the floor?
Or will they be raised
commodes, like porcelain chairs?
For absolutely everything I have on the topic of toilets,
arranged on a country by country basis, see my
collection of international toilets.
But allow me to attempt to summarize the distributions
of squatters and commodes, of pans and thrones:

North America

You'll find nothing but raised porcelain commodes
in this part of the world.
Yes, some U.S. or Canadian
state or provincial or national park probably has
a squat toilet somewhere, and there are probably some squat
toilets in Quebec, but I don't remember seeing any and
I certainly don't have any pictures.
Not yet, anyway, but I'm always looking to document
new examples.

Or so I wrote, before receiving this corrective from
Jean Gould of Québec:

I protest about your words on squad toilet in Quebec.
It a misunderstanding of the history of British Empire and
of North American economic trends and specially the building
industry.
Quebec was a French province 250 years ago when aristocrats
were peeing on walls corners in Versailles.
After 1759, English rulers came.
Middle Class brought ... English toilet in 19th century.
With 20th century, the American way of life came up.
Since this time "American Standard" rules in architectural
design, including public restroom and private bathroom.
Is so true than Canada, which have adopted metric system
since 30 years used yet British units for all buildings
matters including plumbing.
So squad toilet is exotic for all Canadians including
French Canadians, may be more for them because they
travel more extensively in France.
However, squad toilet is more common in south of France,
and in North Africa.
Squad Toilet is a mix of home made building and industrial
production, like shower, people buy a square cement slab
with little walls (3-4 inches) and build walls on the spot
and put ceramic on its.

Pit toilet with fiberglass seat in the
Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

We were on our third day of paddling, at a location you
probably could reach in one long and hard day of paddling.
We were on a small island near the border.

The location was marked as a camp site, as there was a nice
cleared smooth area where you could pitch tents and sleep,
and there was a stone fire ring.

And, back a path into the woods, there was a toilet!

Some poor ranger has to paddle around to dig new pit toilets
and fill in the old ones.

Official Pit Toilet #17 is a conical fiberglass seat fastened
to a frame of 2"x6" boards, placed over a pit that probably
has some lime dumped down into it.
The fiberglass cone serves to funnel the ammonia
into the atmosphere.

My North American toilet, a raised porcelain throne.

But for all practical purposes, all of the toilets you will
find in the United States will be raised porcelain commodes
like the one you see here.

This one is actually mine, so it's reasonably clean but
I'm sure that you would find many others to be nicer.

Mexico
also has raised porcelain commodes,
and has had them for quite some time.

Here you can see
Leon Trotsky's toilet
at his home in Mexico City.
He was assassinated there with an ice ax in 1940.

Notice how high the tank is mounted on the wall.
This would provide for a very powerful flush!
Trotsky was not a man who would trifle with a paltry dribble
into his toilet.

Europe

In most of Europe you will largely find raised porcelain
commodes, with some exceptions.

France
has some squat toilets in restaurants and bars.
A few public squat toilets remain, at least in smaller towns.
The public squat toilets remaining in cities are being
replaced with the
high-tech automated toilet units
that were first developed in France.

Some public toilets in
Romania
are squatters, especially at monasteries and other places
not really catering to outside visitors.

Most public toilets in
Greece
are squatters.
Many of them are very grim and some of them are truly
awful.

While that would be the design generally preferred by the
people of Soviet Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan,
Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan, Tadjikistan), squatting might be
preferred by anyone forced to use it after a long
train journey had rendered the seat quite filthy.

In Germany there is also the question of
"Stand or Sit?" for the guys.

Well, it's not a question for most, the trend in Germany
is for men to sit down to urinate.
At least at home and the office, not at bars and clubs,
mind you.
But the sit-to-pee phenomenon has (of course) multi-syllable
German terms: sitzpinklers,
for those who sit, and
stehpinklers for the rebels
who insist on standing.
You can even
buy stickers forbidding the stehpinklers.

Middle East

As you leave Europe to the south-east, you leave the world
of raised porcelain thrones.
The toilets are mostly squatters.

There are exceptions in
Turkey
where most (but not all) Turkish trains and
many hotels and guesthouses have raised porcelain commodes.
Raised commodes are more common in hotels catering to foreign
visitors, but they are also found in places catering mostly
to Turks.
For example, the hotels where I have stayed in
Konya
and
Malatya,
neither of them all that popular with foreign visitors,
had raised porcelain commodes.

Squat toilet at the Mavi House guesthouse in the
Sultanahmet district of
İstanbul, Turkey.

As for Israel, I haven't been there, but I've been told
that in the non-Arab areas it's exclusively raised seats.
As someone e-mailed me,
"I've been to cities, Moshavim, Kibbutzim and towns,
but everywhere I go — porcelain seats."

Clearly the seats-versus-squatters trend is a cultural
one, not a strictly geographical one.

And, to judge by the former USAF members who spent a year
or more at Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey and later
contacted me asking how they might
install a squat toilet in their home
in the U.S., it can be a personal one that changes away
from the trend of both geography and native culture.

Here are two squat toilets on board
Egyptian transportation.

The first is a squat toilet found on board the
Egyptian passenger train on the
Aswan-Luxor-Cairo
route paralleling the
Nile.

Although this was an express train and thus far
superior to the conditions found on board local train
service, there was something dreadfully wrong here.

No Egyptian train toilet is supposed to be this clean!

The second is a toilet on board a ferry between
Aqaba, Jordan
and
Dahab
on the
Sinai peninsula.
Don't be overly offended by this!
You're seeing lots of rust, not a lack of cleaning.

Asia

Or at least what little I've seen of that huge and
diverse continent, my travels so far being limited to parts of
China
and
Japan.

Let's start with some squat toilets at the
Temple of the Six Banyan Trees
in Guangzhou, People's Republic of China.
Notice the thick ceramic blocks where you place your feet.

Public toilets in east Asia are almost all squatters.
Some hotels have raised porcelain throne toilets
in the guest rooms, especially large Japanese hotels
catering to Western business travelers,
but many feature squat toilets.

The two squat toilets seen below are around
Yangshou
and
Xingping
in Guangxi Provence in southeastern China.

Here is a case where you are offered a choice of squat
toilet and raised porcelain commode.
Someone who usually has an aversion to squat toilets
might find them preferable in some situations like this.

That leads us to...

If I have a choice, should I squat or sit?

That is entirely up to you.
It's your decision and we really don't need
to hear all about it.

However, there are some people with very strong
opinions about this.
Some of them are very insistent.
They're zealous evangelists of squatting.
For some reason it only works one way,
you never find a complete stranger telling you at length
how you absolutely must sit on a raised porcelain commode.

This series of pictures shows one author's
five-step process
for getting into the correct position:

My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001,
although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous
Toilet of the World page until
January 17, 2002.
Some time soon after that I split it into categories,
and the collection has grown ever since.

In December, 2010 I registered the
toilet-guru.com
domain and moved the pages to a dedicated server.